Grand illusions

WHEN George Packer first arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2003, his prewar idealism almost instantly smashed up against the country’s “postwar” reality. Packer had spent the months leading up to the invasion arguing the liberal case for regime change in Baghdad. When he finally glimpsed a U.S. soldier on Iraqi soil, he found himself “stupefied that all the abstract arguments over the idea of a war had actually led to this.”

Two and a half years after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, Packer has written “The Assassins’ Gate,” a deftly constructed and eloquently told account of the war’s origins and aftermath. Packer, now a staff writer for the New Yorker, was an ambivalent member of an unusual prewar alliance of grand-strategizing neoconservatives and humanitarian-minded liberal hawks who were spinning visions of democratic transformation in the Middle East. “By a chain reaction, a reverse domino effect,” Packer writes of their theory, “war in Iraq would weaken the Middle East’s dictatorships and undermine its murderous ideologies and begin to spread the balm of liberal democracy.” With the Bush administration’s primary justifications for war dissolved -- Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, to almost everyone’s surprise, and Hussein’s support for Al Qaeda, to the surprise of almost no one who was paying attention -- spreading democracy is the only one left.

For Packer, “the story of the Iraq war is a story of ideas,” and his opening chapters try to clarify what those ideas were and, more vexingly, how they came to have such influence. The key figure in this regard is the liberal-minded Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya. Long before Defense Department neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi became household names, Makiya was huddled in cafes in Cambridge, Mass., denouncing Hussein’s brutality. As the 1990s wore on, Makiya made common cause with an array of now infamous characters -- some unsavory opportunists, some principled (if often feckless) idealists -- each of whom had come to see a liberated Iraq at the heart of his particular vision of a new world. Makiya and those swayed by his human rights-centered arguments became, Packer writes, “uneasy allies of administration hawks.”

When the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 revived the crusading spirit in U.S. foreign policy, these advocates of regime change were the only ones waiting with a plan grand enough to satisfy Bush’s newfound ambitions. Ultimately, though, even this explanation is not completely satisfactory. Packer quotes Richard Haass, former director of policy planning in the State Department, about a June 2002 meeting at which then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice indicated that Bush had already made up his mind on Iraq. “This was news to Haass,” Packer writes. “Everyone at the top level of the administration could recite the arguments on either side by heart; the question was how to weigh them. Now the policy had been set without the weighing ever taking place.” “It was an accretion, a tipping point,” Haass later told Packer. “A decision was not made -- a decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.”

Any discussion of Iraq must begin by acknowledging that it’s too soon to tell how things will turn out. Exactly where the country is going is a matter of framing and focus -- whether you see the purple-stained thumbs of women leaving polling stations or the grisly aftermath of a suicide bombing, the abuse by Americans at Abu Ghraib or the mass graves of Hussein’s torture victims. Many writers, especially those with a partisan stake in the outcome, have ventured to postwar Iraq to cherry-pick images that support their prewar opinions. Packer also set out “to see the political and cultural flowering post-Saddam Iraq might produce,” but he resists the temptations of “willful blindness.” Although he works in snapshots and anecdotes, every time an image might allow him to settle into a simple conclusion about the war’s worthiness, he turns his attention -- and his considerable powers of description and dramatization -- to another image that points to the opposite conclusion. The cumulative effect is a wrenching cognitive dissonance -- the kind, Packer observes, that few Americans can stand but with which Iraqis live every day.

The book’s narrative is woven from the stories of individuals coping with such cognitive dissonance: a Shiite sheik combing the files of Hussein’s secret police, a well-meaning but disoriented U.S. commander fighting the insurgency, overworked and emotionally overburdened young American officials, Iraqis of all stripes struggling to recover from the “psychological demolition” wrought by Hussein as they navigate the infuriating and often deadly post-Hussein era. When we encounter Makiya in his homeland after three decades in exile, he is at the Baghdad convention center lecturing Iraqis on the virtues of a liberal constitution. After he finishes, Packer recounts, a tribal sheik “stood up and said, ‘I have no running water, no electricity, no security -- and you are talking about a constitution?’ ”

Much of Packer’s reporting registers the consequences of hubris, myopia, incompetence, naivete and casual brutality on the part of policymakers and soldiers -- “a glimpse under the rock of the occupation.” A lot of this, including the White House’s prewar disregard for expert opinion and missteps by L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, is already well-documented. Packer makes it deeply human and maddeningly vivid.

Just weeks before the war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was publicly dismissing the requisites of nation-building and Wolfowitz was arguing that “it’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.” But Packer arrives in a country lacking functioning telephones, electricity or stoplights, overrun by looters and full of “poor and beaten down” people, “[t]heir cheeks

Seeing the devastation before him, Packer -- like many other agonized liberal hawks who sense that they may have rallied behind the wrong war for all the right reasons -- wants desperately to believe that the tragedies of present-day Iraq were avoidable: If only U.S. policymakers had not disbanded the Iraqi army, if only they had sent more troops, if only they had heeded so many prescient warnings, and on and on. But there is something slightly disingenuous about such blame. As Packer acknowledges, it was all too obvious in the months before the invasion that the Bush administration was not planning seriously for post-Hussein Iraq; many supporters of the war were so enamored of their own vision of it that they forgot to take note of what people on the ground were doing.

Over the course of his reporting, Packer talks frequently with a young woman named Aseel. “The status of her dreams,” he writes, “became one index for me of the status of America’s vision for Iraq.” Aseel, a computer programmer, lives in fear of former Baathists and newly energized fundamentalists alike, and at one point says that she must leave Iraq. Still, she doesn’t believe the decision to topple Hussein was a mistake. “We are more important than missiles!” she says. In the face of such sentiments, Packer cannot stomach regret for the war either. He thus savages the conduct of the war in part to salvage the noble ideas behind it. In the end, though, those ideas -- about the virtuous uses of U.S. power, about the need to fight to uphold human rights and liberal values -- may suffer from the fallout over Iraq more than anything else.

In a previous book, a family-history-cum-memoir called “Blood of the Liberals,” Packer told the story of a young writer named Randolph Bourne. As the United States prepared to send troops into World War I, the liberal hawks of the day (headquartered then as now at the New Republic magazine) ostracized Bourne for his dissent from their high-minded belligerence, their faith in “a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war.” “Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it,” Bourne wrote. “War determines its own end.” Packer does not say whether he thought back to these words in the heady days before the bombs started falling in March 2003. There is little doubt that he has remembered them many times since. *